Glass

Glass is a non-crystalline amorphous solid that is often transparent and has widespread practical, technological, and decorative usage in, for example, window panes, tableware, and optoelectronics. Scientifically, the term "glass" is often defined in a broader sense, encompassing every solid that possesses a non-crystalline (that is, amorphous) structure at the atomic scale and that exhibits a glass transition when heated towards the liquid state.

The most familiar, and historically the oldest, types of glass are based on the chemical compound silica (silicon dioxide), the primary constituent of sand. The term glass, in popular usage, is often used to refer only to this type of material, which is familiar from use as window glass and in glass bottles. Of the many silica-based glasses that exist, ordinary glazing and container glass is formed from a specific type called soda-lime glass, composed of approximately 75% silicon dioxide (SiO₂), sodium oxide (Na₂O) from sodium carbonate (Na₂CO₃), calcium oxide, also called lime (CaO), and several minor additives. A very clear and durable quartz glass can be made from pure silica which is very tough and resistant to thermal shock, being able to survive immersion in water while red hot. However, quartz must be heated to well over 3,000 °F (1,650 °C) (white hot) before it begins to melt, and it has a very narrow glass transition, making glassblowing and hot working difficult. In glasses like soda lime, the other compounds are used to lower the melting temperature and improve the temperature workability of the product at a cost in the toughness, thermal stability, and optical transmittance.

Glass (film)

Glass (Dutch: Glas) is a 1958 Dutch short documentary film by director and producer Bert Haanstra. The film won the Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject in 1959. The film is about the glass industry in the Netherlands. It contrasts the handmade crystal from the Royal Leerdam Glass Factory with automated bottle making machines. The accompanying music ranges from jazz to techno. Short segments of artisans making various glass goods by hand are joined with those of mass production. It is often acclaimed to be the perfect short documentary.

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Glass (1989 film)

Glass is a 1989 Australian erotic thriller which was the feature debut of Chris Kennedy.

Cast

Production

Chris Kennedy made the movie shortly after leaving film school:

Reception

According to Kennedy the film sold very well overseas and recouped a fair amount of its budget. The director calls it "a bit of a raw and amateurish effort, but there are bits and pieces of it I quite like."

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Nil

Nil is a word commonly used to mean not in list or zero; it is one of several names for the number 0.

Nil may also refer to:

Given names

Surname

Places

Nil (band)

Nil (stylized as nil) is a Japanese rock band that was formed in 1998 by Tetsu Takano (ex-Malice Mizer, ex-Mega8Ball, ex-Zigzo, The JuneJulyAugust), Hiroyuki Kashimoto and Kyoshi Moro. The original intent of Nil was to become Tetsu's solo unit and even though it has become a full fledged band, all lyrics and songwriting has been solely handled by Tetsu. The band only lasted briefly during its first incarnation and went on hiatus by the end of 1998. It would not resurface until the middle of 2002 when they would start recording again and Tetsu formed his own record label, Afro Skull Records. The name "Nil" literally means "absolute zero" and as an acronym refers to "native irreligious language".

In 2005, Nil had many setbacks which resulted in the departure of founding members Kashimoto and Moro who both left the band on January 10, 2005, the last day of the "Touring Inferno" tour. Eventually replacement drummer Furuton (ex-Oblivion Dust, ex-Mega8Ball support) left the band after only 6 months. By the end of 2005 Nil finally settled down with the addition of Masaru Kobayashi (ex-Soy Sauce Sonix, ex-Sads, The Cro-Magnons) on bass and Kazama Hiroyuki (ex-Fantastic Designs) on drums.

NIL (programming language)

NIL was a 32-bit implementation of Lisp developed at MIT and intended to be the successor to Maclisp. NIL stood for "New Implementation of LISP", and was in part a response to DECs VAX computer. The project was headed by Jon L White, with a stated goal of maintaining compatibility with MacLisp whilst fixing many of the problems with the language.

History

The Lisp language was invented in 1958 by John McCarthy while he was at MIT. From its inception, Lisp was closely connected with the artificial intelligence research community, especially on PDP-10 systems. Lisp was used as the implementation of the programming language Micro Planner that was the foundation for the famous AI system SHRDLU. Lisp, in particular Maclisp (so called because it originated at MIT's project MAC) was also used to implement the Macsyma computer algebra system. In the 1970s, as AI research spawned commercial offshoots, the performance of existing Lisp systems became a growing issue.

Partly because of garbage collection (Lisp would use stop-and-copy garbage collection of its single heap for memory allocation) and partly because of its representation of internal structures, Lisp became difficult to run on the memory-limited stock hardware of the day. This led to the creation of LISP machines: dedicated hardware for running Lisp environments and programs. An alternative was to use the more powerful commodity hardware which was becoming available, in particular the DEC VAX.